Fortune June/July 2020

learning by giving

BY MID-MAY Brazil was being ravaged by a brutal epidemic. COVID-19, which had already infected some 8% of the population, was beginning to swarm through the teeming cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. But it was a different scourge—a bone-crushing disease called dengue—that had already sickened nearly 700,000 Brazilians this year. In the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (in Portuguese, the name means “Thick Bushes of the South”), a local newspaper reported a spate of recent dengue cases. Five thousand miles away, in Boston, a machine-learning program plucked the news from an Internet site, mined the text (in Portuguese) for keywords suggesting an outbreak, and posted an “alert” on HealthMap—an online global disease warning system developed by epidemiologists at Boston Children’s Hospital. On any given day, the global map on…

the conversation

“We don’t worry about liquidity. We just make our strategy clear: Focus on our employees, our customers, and our communities, period.”—CHUCK ROBBINS Welcome to you both. Let’s start with you, Chuck. You’ve said that 95% of your 77,000-strong global workforce is now telecommuting. What have you learned by watching so much of your team work remotely? ROBBINS: That many have figured out they can be productive in this environment in ways they didn’t understand before. It’s been strange, but this crisis hasn’t been a technological stretch for us because we built this technology; it’s pretty native to us. I think that we’re going to be much more comfortable having meetings by teleconference. So [post-COVID] we’ll have people who will work from home, those who’ll work in the office, and people who’ll do…

facing the unavoidable risk

Peter Schwartz has spent five decades studying the balance between risk and opportunity. As the head of scenario planning for oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, as a consultant on movies such as the sci-fi thriller Minority Report and disaster epic Deep Impact, and since 2011 as the senior vice president for strategic planning at cloud software phenomenon Salesforce.com, the 73-year-old has devoted his career to peering past the noise of the present to focus on the future. But never before has he seen a risk scenario as unpredictable and confusing as the coronavirus crisis. “I’ve been doing this since 1972,” says Schwartz. “This is the greatest level of uncertainty I’ve seen—ever. I’ve been through the oil crises of the 1970s, several financial crises, the attacks of 9/11, and two different Iraq…

the ceo outlook

CEOS OF THE FORTUNE 500, surveyed in the last two weeks of April, believe it will be years before the effects of COVID-19 are purged from the U.S. economy. Only 27% expect their workers to fully return to their usual workplaces this year. A majority believe it will be the first quarter of 2022 before overall economic activity returns to levels reached before the pandemic, and another 27% don’t expect that until the first quarter of 2023. Most say business travel at their company will never return to levels reached before the crisis. Despite the economic impact, three-fourths believe the crisis will force their companies to accelerate their technological transformation.…

the ceo who keeps animal pharm going

WHEN KRISTIN PECK became CEO of Zoetis in January, the animal health company was growing rapidly, thanks in part to steady growth in spending on pets. Just a few weeks later, coronavirus lockdowns turned the global economy upside down. But they also prompted Americans to adopt pets in record numbers, enabling Zoetis and Peck to face their first big crisis with what you might call a tailwind. Zoetis, which makes medicines, vaccines, and other products, was spun off from Pfizer in 2013 and joined the Fortune 500 in 2019. (It’s now No. 472.) It’s the market-share leader in “companion” animal health, with 22% of the market, and in several livestock categories too. With the pandemic doing only minor damage so far to commercial livestock or pet spending, Zoetis’s business has held…

who will pay for the pandemic

THE INDIANA Repertory Theatre is a fixture of cultural life in the Midwest. But after the COVID-19 outbreak struck, the theater had to scramble, briefly performing Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in front of a smaller audience, and then, after the situation became too risky, shutting down completely. “We knew immediately we’d have over $1 million in lost revenue,” says managing director Suzanne Sweeney, who has had to lay off dozens of actors and stagehands to cut expenses. 40% U.S. COMPANIES THAT HAVE BUSINESS INTERRUPTION INSURANCE Hoping to cushion the blow, Sweeney called the theater’s insurance broker to collect on a policy that the organization had to cover interruptions to its business. The insurer, however, refused to pay because it said the loss hadn’t come from physical damage like a…